First up from The God Machine this week is an interesting legal dispute in California about the responsibilities of medical professionals who have religious qualms about their work. We’ve heard quite a bit about pharmacists who don’t want to fill prescriptions for medication they find morally objectionable, but what about doctors refusing to treat some patients?
On the heels of its ruling on same-sex marriage, California’s highest court will decide another potentially landmark civil rights case: whether doctors can refuse to treat certain patients for religious reasons.
The case reaches back nearly 10 years, to when Guadalupe “Lupita” Benitez of Oceanside was trying to conceive. Benitez, who is gay, says doctors violated her civil rights because they refused her a fertility treatment, saying it was against their religion to perform insemination on a lesbian.
The two doctors and their employer, North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group, say they denied Benitez treatment because it is against their Christian beliefs to perform insemination on unwed women, whether heterosexual or lesbian. Their refusal, they argue, is protected by their constitutional right to freedom of religion.
The question, of course, focuses on the limits of a physician’s ability to discriminate based on religious worldview. There are plenty of OB/GYN doctors who refuse to perform abortions, but this is different — we’re talking about doctors who provide insemination services, but only want to make the services available to certain kinds of patients.
“The case raises a whole series of questions about the basis for which people can be denied medical treatment, particularly the extent to which gays or lesbians could be denied access to reproductive technology,” Joan Hollinger, a professor of family law at the University of California at Berkeley, said.
A trial court backed Benitez’s argument in 2004, concluding that a medical group’s religious objections do not trump California’s anti-discrimination laws. A year later, a state appeals court sided with the doctors. The state Supreme Court will settle the issue this year.
Next up from The God Machine is a follow-up to a story we’ve been following for a few weeks now. South Carolina recently became the first state to offer license plates that feature a Christian cross with the phrase “I Believe.” The state legislature passed the measure unanimously, and this week, my friends at Americans United for Separation of Church and State challenged the plates in federal court.
[AU] filed the lawsuit in Columbia, S.C., on behalf of three Christian clergy members, a rabbi and a Hindu group from the state, arguing that the license plates violated the Constitution.
The group is seeking an injunction to prevent the state from even producing the plates.
Approval of the plate “was a clear signal that Christianity is the preferred religion of South Carolina,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the group’s executive director and a United Church of Christ minister, “and obviously we don’t believe the Constitution allows this.”
Just as an aside, you can only imagine the emails AU has received since filing the lawsuit.
And finally this week, a new poll suggests how questions about evolution are asked makes a big difference in the results.
Most Americans accept the theory of evolution and actually favor teaching evolution over creationism or intelligent design in public school science classes, according to a new study conducted by a coalition of scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, National Science Teachers Associations and the American Institute of Biological Sciences.
This runs contrary to studies through the years, which showed Americans backing creationist accounts to the findings of evolutionary biology. But this new study, which surveyed 1,000 likely U.S. voters, gives new hope that maybe Americans are getting better at reconciling faith and science. Or maybe Americans always did prefer evolution and results depended more on how the question was worded than on actual beliefs, as the Skeptical Inquirer suggests in its July/August 2008 issue. (“Likely Voters Prefer Evolution over Creationism” by Greg Laden.)
The survey asked half the respondents whether they believed “all living things” evolved over time, of which 61 percent responded “yes.”
The other half of respondents were asked only whether “humans and other living things” evolved, to which 53 percent said “yes.”
Hope springs eternal.